The institutional design and quality of e-participation

-participation has become an important part of the political landscape in Europe but little is actually known about its effects on European democracies. There is a multitude of

e-participation projects that, in theory, enable citizens to set the political agenda and influence policy processes. The proclaimed goals of these projects are usually related to the improvement of the democratic practice in some form. However, the reality is more ambiguous: some projects are dominated by lobby groups or political elites; others show poor deliberation quality and are disconnected from policy making. From a theoretical perspective, it is not even clear what democratic standards e-participation is supposed to attain, making success very difficult to measure. I am addressing this problem by constructing my own theoretical framework and indicators for evaluating e-participation projects, in particular their democratic quality. The quality is assessed by using selected democracy dimensions: accountability, equality, responsiveness and freedom (as illustrated in Table 1). I assume that there is a causal link between the institutional design of e-participation projects and the quality of these projects.

Table 1. The operationalization of democratic quality with respect to e-democracy projects (based on Coleman and Blumler 2009; Diamond and Morlino 2005; Morlino 2009; and Janssen and Kies 2004)

Dimension Indicators

Participation without domination of any group(s)/interests Equality

No discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, language, opinions, social or personal conditions etc.

Freedom Type of moderation

Respect for privacy

Information to participants about how their inputs are received and handled The institutional design is framed according to Fung’s participatory dimensions, which determine whether an e-democracy project will be successful or not: (i) eligible participants, (ii) communication mechanisms, and (iii) influence on policy (Fung 2006). The first dimension deals with participant selection mechanisms that include (i) recruitment of lay stakeholders, (ii) random, (iii) targeted and (iv) self-selection¹. The second dimension focuses on how participants communicate and decide upon policy. On the one extreme of this scale, participants are passive (i) spectators who receive information about a policy issue. Moving towards a more active approach, the project design enables participants to (ii) express and (iii) develop preferences, i.e. transform their opinions and preferences. The latter mechanism is close to deliberative ideals, which promote negotiation, clarification of persisting disagreements and discovery of new options based upon reasons, arguments and principles. Finally, the third dimension deals with the influence of participation on policy-making. Its first mechanism is about exercising (i) communicative influence that can mobilize people for or against a policy issue and at the same time influence the decision-makers e.g. by the sheer mass of people involved or by their testimonies. The second mechanism is (ii) advice and consultation, whereby the officials commit to receiving input from participants but reserve the right not to use it when making the final decision. At last, as addition to Fung’s model, the (iii) mandatory consideration mechanism indicates that the policy-makers have committed to formally consider, but not necessarily to implement, citizen proposals already at the outset of the project.

The link between the institutional design and the democratic quality is explored through in-depth, cross-country comparison of similar e-participation cases. The case studies include e-petitioning initiatives and e-Parliament projects i.e. initiatives aimed at allowing citizens to monitor and actively engage in the legislative activities of parliaments. Most of them are pioneering cases without equivalents in their respective country. These projects are analysed from the point of view of both their initiators and participants by drawing on an analysis of project documentation and usage statistics; results of online user surveys and interviews with project creators, public officials and politicians.

2. E-Parliaments

The general e-democracy trend in the public sector tells us that state authorities are taking a rather conservative approach to technology-based engagement with citizens. Governments have invested more in provision of one-way information and e-services rather than in the more interactive applications allowing for partnerships with citizens (Gibson et al. 2004; Smith 2009;

Zittel 2004). The situation is similar among national parliaments; they are reluctant to use the more innovative digital media like forums, blogs and social networking to communicate with citizens

1 Only a selection of Fung’s mechanisms is used in this paper since not all of them adapt to e-democracy projects under study.

2 E-parliament is here defined as the application of information technology to the documentation and dissemination of legislative activity. E-parliament projects aim at providing information and statistics about:

individual legislators, legislative proposals, votes thereon, and texts of legislation.

E-Democracy & E-Participation 61 (Berntzen et al. 2006; Williamson 2009). At the same time, a new generation of e-Parliament projects has emerged in the past few years. They combine information from parliamentary websites with social media tools in order to render the activities of elected representatives more transparent and to engage citizens in parliamentary affairs. Many of them use debate platforms, where citizens can discuss the work of their representatives, and have applications that allow users to vote on parliamentary bills and compare their votes with those of their representatives (Sasaki 2010). E-Parliament projects are also keen investors in social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter, which help them to sustain interaction with their users. What is remarkable about these projects, is that most of them do not originate from parliaments but emerge from the grassroots-level, and are carried out prevalently by NGOs and volunteering citizens. In the following section, we explore two of these projects: OpenParlamento in Italy and NosDéputés in France. These projects are driven by non-profit organisations and were launched almost simultaneously, in 2009.

They both offer information and statistics about parliamentary activities and the possibility of discussing the legislative acts directly online. OpenParlamento has slightly more advanced applications with respect to the NosDéputés, e.g. the possibility of voting on legislative proposals, describing their content and amending them by making changes directly within the text.

2.1. Comparison between OpenParlamento and NosDéputés 2.1.1. Equality

Both OpenParlamento and NosDéputés have self-selected participants, which means that all citizens who wish to engage have an equal right to do so. At the same time, this implies a risk that certain groups may prevail among project participants³. In terms of equality, it is also important to distinguish between active and passive participation. A project might show a perfect distribution of participants in line with the population of reference but the disadvantaged groups could still remain without voice in the online debate. In fact, passive online participation generally prevails over the active one, and OpenParlamento and NosDéputésare are no exception to this tendency. In the case of OpenParlamento, the misbalance between passive and active participants is particularly flagrant when the involvement requires written input. As shown in Table 2, the number of OpenParlamento site visitors and registered users far exceeds the number of descriptions of and comments to legislative acts. The OpenParlamento users also have the possibility to vote in favour or against proposed legislation and in this respect the ratio of active participation looks more encouraging. The number of votes (8,165) with respect to the number of OpenParlamento users (12,237) is quite high. This might be due to the easiness of casting a vote — just pushing a button

— compared to the hassle of putting together intelligible comments. Although OpenParlamento has more site visitors and even 13 times more registered users than NosDéputés, NosDéputés users are much more active. To date, they have made more comments (870) than the OpenParlamento users (821). The equality issue still remains; even if at the first glance the ratio of active/passive participants seems better on NosDéputés, only about every fourth user has actually posted any comment.

3 The actual socio-economic characteristics and digital skills of OpenParlamento and NosDéputés users will be explored by a forthcoming online survey.

Table 2: Comparison between OpenParlamento and NosDéputés users (OpenParlamento⁴ and NosDéputés⁵ project statistics 2010)

Total figures 2009-2010 OpenParlamento NosDéputés

Site visitors 421,897 370,100

Registered users 12,237 966

Votes on legislative acts 8,165 n/a

Comments to legislative acts 821 870

WIKI descriptions of legislative acts 154 n/a

A deeper analysis into user posts on OpenParlamento and NosDéputés shows a scattered pattern of activity. A large share of OpenParlamento comments (64 percent) focuses on merely three legislative acts. If we examine the related comments, it becomes clear that most users limit their interventions to one or two comments, while a minority overshadows the debate with over ten comments. A pattern of domination also emerges on NosDéputés; the six most active users have produced over 30 percent of all comments, while 74 percent of users have made no comments at all. Moreover, it is also plausible that same individuals have registered and provided comments under several user names, which means that the domination might be even stronger than it appears from the aforementioned statistics. The generally uneven ratio of few active users versus the many registered ones confirms the evidence about minority domination presented in the literature. Only about ten percent of Internet users, or five percent of the whole European population, are effectively involved in producing content or offer reviews/feedbacks (Osimo 2008).

Online communities usually have a very small core group of contributors — estimated to one percent of visitors — that actively posts, asks and answers questions, while the rest are mostly passive readers (Glencross 2009; Jakob 2006 in Bittle et al. 2009).

With regard to discrimination, while NosDéputés lacks any specific user rules, OpenParlamento aims to be free from censorship and wants all persons, opinions and political positions to be respected equally. It is forbidden to offend the dignity and reputation of persons, threaten other visitors or insult persons, ethnic groups, gender, religions, economic conditions and political opinions. At the same time, both OpenParlamento and NosDéputés have a noninterventionist approach to moderation; posts are reviewed only post-factum and not in a systematic way.

Notwithstanding the large freedom given to users, offenses and personal attacks on OpenParlamento occur very rarely and have never occurred on NosDéputés. No posts have ever been reported or removed from the project sites, which implies that the users are exceptionally well-behaved.

2.1.2. Accountability and freedom

The institutional design of OpenParlamento and NosDéputés foresees development of preferences. The project applications allow participants to explore, to learn about issues and, to some extent, develop their preferences and perspectives. The accountability criterion under study implies that balanced and comprehensive information about legislative acts should be accessible to all users. Both OpenParlamento and NosDéputés rely on official data as the main source of information, which as such presumes a certain level of objectivity. By offering nitty-gritty and

4 Data covering July 2009 –June 2010.

5 Data covering September 2009 – October 2010

E-Democracy & E-Participation 63